New campaign seeks to mobilize Hispanic voters in Florida and across the country
By the time President Donald Trump goes up for reelection next November, Hispanics will make up the largest ethnic minority group in the electorate, a milestone buoyed in part by the fast-growing number of Hispanic voters in Florida. But demographic trends alone won’t automatically precipitate political power, activists say.
Latino voters still need to make it out to the ballot box.
To that end, the country’s largest Hispanic advocacy group, UnidosUS, recently announced a multimillion-dollar initiative to maximize Latino civic engagement across the country, with particular attention paid to Florida and four other “priority states” with significant Hispanic populations.
In Florida, UnidosUS has already established a robust voter registration operation, deploying on-the-ground canvassers to register 48,000 new Latino voters in the state in 2018. Those efforts were mostly focused on the Miami and Orlando metropolitan areas.
As part of its new campaign, titled Adelante: Moving Us Forward, UnidosUS will replicate its Florida canvassing model in other parts of the country, with the goal of registering 120,000 new Latino voters nationwide in time for the 2020 election.
“To fight the greatest political challenge in our community’s recent history, today we are launching UnidosUS’s biggest initiative to date, aimed at strengthening the power and influence of the Hispanic community in the 2020 election,” Janet Murguía, president of UnidosUS, said at the launch announcement.
Murguía added that an additional campaign aim is to reach more than 350,000 voters with get-out-the-vote activities.
“Adelante is meant to be more than just a voter registration campaign,” she said.
GROWING THE LATINO ELECTORATE
In 2020, a record-setting 32 million Latinos are expected to be eligible to vote, but just about 14 million will actually cast ballots, according to estimates by UnidosUS. At play is a long-running trend: In every presidential election since 1996, the number of eligible Latino voters who didn’t vote has exceeded the number of those who did.
According to Clarissa Martínez de Castro, UnidosUS’ deputy vice president of research, advocacy and legislation, the issue isn’t a turnout gap as much as it is a registration gap.
“We know that there’s a lot of chatter about whether Latinos vote or don’t vote. But in presidential elections, 80 to 83% of Latinos who are registered to vote do so,” she said.
As Martínez de Castro explained, the mismatch between Latinos who are able to register to vote and those who actually register can be explained, in part, by the fact that “it’s a very young population.” Hispanics are the youngest voters in the electorate and, generally speaking, young voters vote less than their older counterparts.
Lack of funding for registration drives is also a contributing factor.
“We see obscene amounts of money get spent every political cycle, but very little of that goes to voter registration,” said Martínez de Castro. “We believe it’s very important because investments in voter registration are an investment in expanding the size of the Latino electorate. And we are very focused on that.”
Last year, the number of Hispanic registered voters in Florida increased 6.2% since the 2016 presidential election, to a record 2.1 million people. That was a growth rate more than three times as fast as that of the overall number of registered voters in that stretch of time.
“We believe that bringing more voices into our democracy is a good thing,” said Martínez de Castro.
